Aerospace company,
Thomas Space raising 16.2 million in a series a round led
by Cantos Ventures and the Yamaguchi number 10 family office,
Thomas Space says it's building the future of
orbital logistics and provides last mile transportation services
for satellite operators.
The startup is developing a series of so called orbital transfer
vehicles which aim to reduce the cost of access to space.
And joining me now is Vanessa Clark, Ceo of Thomas Space and William Kowalski,
the company's CEO oh,
Vanessa will start with you so much interest among our viewers in space.
How far off is your company from a launch?
We're starting manufacturing of our first two vehicles right now.
So our first launch is booked to go up in January of 2024.
So the clock is ticking for us and the clock is ticking not too far off William.
You're the ceo of this company operationally. How are you going to meet this goal?
Well, you know,
we've been pretty fortunate with closing this race and we were planning for it.
So a lot of the vendors we needed to have on contract to get to space on this timeline.
We're ready to go as soon as the deal,
documents were signed and we were signing contracts,
wiring payments immediately and we've already received quite a
few things in house and are putting it together.
Yeah, and also doubling headcount right now. So that's,
that's been a big effort over the past couple of weeks,
but a lot of interviewing the last few weeks.
So your startup is definitely in hiring mode. I get it.
If you want to send things to space, I would think you would need a lot of brain power
to make that work. Vanessa, how complicated is this?
You're the expert here,
the CEO how easy is it to create a space startup and actually launch things into space
from a technical perspective. Any spacecraft is hard.
So it's a computer that has to operate nonstop
for years on end in a harsh environment.
So
luckily there is decades of heritage and space components and systems.
How we're doing things differently though is bringing
in more automation and also reducing the costs.
So on outside of things where a lot of our effort
has been focused over the past couple of years is working
out how to do really complicated things in space with components
that you would normally find in drones or aircraft that just aren't
typically used in this environment.
So some of the things that we've been realizing over the past few years are how do we
use automotive sensors to automatically drive our orbital transfer
vehicles to locate a customer's spacecraft in space,
navigate to it and capture it.
And so that is one of the big challenges that we've
really worked on and we're finally ready to field William.
Talk to me about this process.
We talked about of course, how you want to reach this goal.
But the technology, the know how the operations of this, how do you make this work?
I mean, I think it's,
it's a combination of hiring the right people
with the right experience and just thinking about it
Um intelligently.
So one of the things that Thomas has done expertly, well, in my opinion,
is engineer for cost as well.
So as Vanessa mentioned, you know, these sensors,
the traditional way you would do the scenario, spaces use space rated cameras,
that camera alone could be $3 million.
So we bought what's called a thermal vacuum chamber on ebay
last summer and we bought a bunch of car sensors,
put it in the thermal vacuum chamber to see
how would it perform in a space like environment
iterated through a few things and was able to find
things that were $10,000 as opposed to $3 million.
So it's just being really cognizant of where you're spending your money and
making every dollar count because you can spend a million dollars quickly.
Okay. So fiscal responsibility, I like that.
I think that's a good motto, especially these days
an age and especially
of, of course, when you have a lot of complex things going on, Vanessa,
my final question to you and we don't have a ton of time,
but a lot of people might be interested in space.
They might have seen that Netflix movie.
Don't look up Leonardo Dicaprio, Meryl Streep Jennifer Lawrence. Right.
The whole premise is,
people are freaked out that an asteroid is gonna
crash into the earth and explode the entire planet.
But I see here that your technology is actually working on asteroid deflection.
How's that gonna work?
So right now,
one of the biggest challenges with having an effective response to asteroid
deflection is that it takes a long time to travel to the asteroid
and then apply force to it to move it.
The propulsion systems that we're developing for our orbital transfer vehicles,
reduce the response time from seven years to a couple of months.
So hopefully we don't ever have to use our technologies for that application,
but we're finally giving the planet a backup in
case we do get into a scenario like that.
A plan B I like that so that we can keep planet A I like that.
Vanessa Clark, Ceo of Thomas Space and William Kowalski, the company's C C 00.
Thank you both for joining.